Teen Girl Charged In Poison Plot

February 03, 1987|By George Papajohn and Steve Johnson.

A 14-year-old Schaumburg girl who police contend planned to run away with her girlfriend after they both poisoned their parents was charged in a juvenile petition Monday with attempted murder and aggravated battery.

Her friend, 13, who lives in Streamwood, is still at home but her father said he expects police to charge her.

Both teenagers, who are 8th graders at different junior high schools, had been unsuccessful in previous attempts to run away from home, according to relatives and police. The Schaumburg girl`s father had tracked her down and brought her home, said Schaumburg Lt. Richard Casler.

This time, though, the girls planned to run away together after killing their parents with rat poison, police said.

``They didn`t want their parents to find them or to follow them,`` Casler said. ``These girls were serious about this.``

The plan failed, but not before the girls had poisoned breakfast, dinner leftovers, a chocolate cake and medication over a period of several days last week.

The parents eventually figured things out. The Streamwood girl`s father found four cans of D-Con rat poison, three of which had been opened, in his daughter`s bedroom late last week, Casler said. The father recalled that the girls had looked up information on the effects of rat poison in the encyclopedia and that they also had questioned his wife on the same subject.

Last Thursday, police said he called the father of the Schaumburg girl and urged him to go to a hospital. The girl lives with her father, police said.

At Alexian Brothers Medical Center in Elk Grove Village, the Schaumburg man was told his blood was not coagulating normally, Casler said, which could have been caused by the rat poison. The father said he had been feeling light- headed that week.

After being treated and released, he went to Schaumburg police with the cake, vegetable greens and a plastic bag with granules of poison. On Friday night, he brought his daughter to police headquarters.

The Streamwood parents also had been feeling slightly ill, but doctors at Sherman Hospital in Elgin who examined them Thursday found no problems.

``I got some medical problems this could have complicated but it looks like it didn`t,`` said the Streamwood girl`s father, who received a kidney transplant a year and a half ago from his mother.

He said the problems with his daughter at home began when she chafed at the rules and restrictions he and his wife maintained.

``She`s wanted her own lifestyle for a long time,`` he said. ``But a 13-year-old child should have curfews and should do her schoolwork. When she realized she couldn`t control us and her runaway attempt failed, she felt she had no recourse but to do this. It was her way of maintaining power or maintaining control.``

He said his daughter still was at home, but that he expected her to be charged for the attempted poisoning. ``What she did was wrong,`` he said.

``The police are going to charge her.``

Sgt. Dennis LaFrana of Streamwood police said that police were notified about the incident last Friday. ``There is 13-year-old girl suspect,`` he said. ``She is being questioned.``

The girls first tried to poison the Streamwood couple`s breakfast of eggs and toast, police said. Not satisfied with the results, they baked a chocolate cake that they served to the two families, police said.

Next, the Schaumburg girl put poison in leftovers of ``potatoes and greens`` in her family`s refrigerator, Casler said. She eventually placed some in her father`s medication capsules, too, police said.

Police said that there may have been other instances last week when the girls tried to poison the three parents.

They were not commenting on the reasons behind the girls` desire to run away.

One neighbor of the Streamwood couple described their daughter as attractive and ``very nice`` and her parents as ``exceptionally nice`` but said the girl had tried to run away a couple months ago.

``They`re having a hard time with her there. I think she just got into the wrong crowd.``